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The Well-Marked Roads to Homicidal Rage

Shots explode at a school in Oregon, a brokerage office in Atlanta, or a church in Fort Worth, and the nation is witness to another sudden, seemingly random violent rampage. Before the ambulances leave, the news crews arrive. The killers' neighbors, friends or families submit to interviews, and inevitably, they say something like this: ''He just snapped.''

But the killers do not just snap. An examination by The New York Times of 100 rampage murders found that most of the killers spiraled down a long slow slide, mentally and emotionally. Most of them left a road map of red flags, spending months plotting their attacks and accumulating weapons, talking openly of their plans for bloodshed. Many showed signs of serious mental health problems.

But in case after case, the Times review found, the warning signs were missed: by a tattered mental health care system; by families unable to face the evidence of serious mental turmoil in their children or siblings; by employers, teachers and principals who failed to take the threats seriously; by the police who, when alerted to the danger by frightened relatives, neighbors or friends, were incapable of intervening before the violence erupted.

James Davis, whose co-workers had nicknamed him Psycho, warned his colleagues at a tool warehouse in Asheville, N.C., ''If they ever decide to fire me, I'll take two or three of them with me.'' His employers did fire him, and feared he would respond with violence, but despite his threats, they failed to protect his co-workers when Mr. Davis returned to take his revenge.

In 34 of the 100 cases, however, families or friends of the killers desperately did try to find help for a person they feared was a ticking time bomb, but were rebuffed by the police, school administrators or mental health workers.

Sylvia Seegrist caromed in and out of mental institutions 12 times in 10 years, while her parents searched for a residential program where she could stay in treatment. They knew she was dangerous. She had stabbed a psychologist and tried to strangle her mother, and had hidden a gun in her apartment. But each time, she was released from the hospital when she seemed to improve.

''We were always fearful that maybe some tragedy would happen,'' said Ruth S. Seegrist, Sylvia's mother. ''She threatened it: 'Someday before I kill myself, I'll bring some people down with me.' '' Sylvia opened fire in a suburban Philadelphia shopping mall in 1985, killing three people and wounding seven.

In response to the recent spate of rampage-style mass shootings in schools, workplaces, stores and other public places, The New York Times re-examined 100 such violent incidents that occurred in the United States over the last 50 years. The Times gathered extensive information on all 100, and looked closely at more than 25 of the cases, a surprising number of which attracted little but local attention. The examination included reviews of court cases, news coverage and mental health records, and interviews with families and friends, psychologists and victims, in an effort to glean what the people closest to each tragedy had learned. In some cases, reporters questioned the killers themselves.

Based on this information, The Times found that in 63 of the 100 cases (which involved 102 killers), the killers made general threats of violence to others in advance. Fifty-five of the 100 cases involved killers who regularly expressed explosive anger or frustration, and 35 killers had a history of violent behavior and assaults. They were so noticeably unstable that even in their very separate circles they had been awarded similar nicknames: ''Crazy Pat,'' ''Crazy John,'' ''Crazy Joe.''

And in 40 cases, family members and others said they noticed a sudden change in behavior in the period before the rampage.

''The more you find out about each of these cases, the more it makes sense,'' said Prof. Dewey G. Cornell, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project, which studies school safety and violence prevention. ''This notion that someone just snaps is based on ignorance and denial,'' Professor Cornell said. ''People don't just snap. Pressures build up.''

Many psychologists caution that it is impossible to predict violent behavior, and that most people who threaten violence never follow through. Often, it is only in retrospect that each killer's life appears to be a coherent chilling narrative foretelling obvious danger. Looking back, it is easy to marvel, how could the people who knew the murderer have failed to see it coming? In particular, how could so many psychiatric workers, and even the police, have missed the warning signs?

In many cases, there was no single person in the potential killer's life to put together the lethal clues. Colleagues, friends, family members, mental health professionals, teachers and the police may have independently sensed something disturbing, but they did not communicate with one another. Frightened neighbors or co-workers decided it was safest to keep their distance. Friends laughed off homicidal talk. Parents did not know where to turn, or just hoped the irrational fury was merely a phase.

''It's like looking at the night sky,'' said Robert Granacher Jr., a psychiatrist in Lexington, Ky., who has examined the records of several rampage murderers. ''If you only see one or two stars, you may not see the whole constellation. It's the same with these fragmentary bits of information; no one has the whole picture.''

In the end, the review of these cases suggests that if people understood more about mental illness and connected the clues, many of these types of rampage killings could be prevented.

''It's going to be tomorrow.''

Jamie Rouse to a friend

IN rural Giles County, Tenn., on Nov. 15, 1995 -- before school shootings regularly made headlines -- a slight 17-year-old strode down the hall of Richland School with his black .22 Remington Viper.

His name was Jamie Rouse, and as always, he was dressed in black. He walked up to two female teachers who were chatting in the hall, and without a word shot each of them in the head. One teacher was gravely wounded, the other died. Then Jamie Rouse smiled and aimed for the school's football coach. But a student named Diane Collins happened to cross his path. A bullet tore through her throat. She was 16 when she died that day.

Jamie Rouse had sent distress signals for years to the adults in his life. More startling, the police say he had told as many as five teenage friends exactly how he planned to bring his rifle to school and begin killing. None of them had called anyone for help. In fact, the night before, word of the planned massacre was passed like macabre gossip along a chain of students, from Jamie, to his close friend Stephen Abbott, to a teenager that Mr. Abbott worked with at the gas station, Billy Rogers.

''He told me something was going to happen at school the next day, that I was going to lose a couple of friends,'' Mr. Rogers later testified. ''Steve told me if there was a God he better make it snow tonight so we ain't got school tomorrow.''

The rampage killers in the study, young and old, often talked for months in advance about their murderous plans. And in 54 of the 100 cases, killers like Jamie Rouse provided explicit descriptions of who, where or when they intended to kill.

Charles Whitman, the infamous sniper who shot 45 people, killing 14, from atop the tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, had told a college psychiatrist four months before the attack that he had been ''thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.''

Michael Carneal, a high school freshman in Paducah, Ky., told schoolmates that ''it would be cool'' to shoot into a student prayer group. He did as he had promised, killing three people and injuring five in 1997.

Andrew Wurst, 14, showed a group of friends a gun hidden in his father's dresser drawer and told them he planned to use nine shells to kill nine people he hated, and then kill himself. In 1998, he started shooting at his eighth-grade prom, killing a popular teacher and injuring three other people.

In case after case, friends, family members and others who heard the threats and did not take action later said they did not act because it seemed unfathomable that a human being would carry through with such threats. Others said they had heard the killer boast of violence so often that, like the villagers hardened to the boy who cried wolf, they just did not take it seriously.

In testimony, Stephen Ray, one of Jamie Rouse's closest friends, said that it had sounded ridiculous when Mr. Rouse ''might have'' said something about shooting someone the day before the killings, when Mr. Rouse was fuming over a fender-bender with a schoolmate's car.

Mr. Ray, now 21 and a college student in Knoxville, trembled in an interview in his dormitory this winter when he said it was hard to tell at the time that Jamie Rouse's blustery threats were real. Even when Mr. Rouse showed up in the morning with a rifle and a box of bullets, Mr. Ray said, he did not believe Jamie would really do it.

''It wasn't a joke,'' Mr. Ray said in a tone of amazement. ''It wasn't a high school prank. It was something real.''

Tennessee prosecutors said they were frustrated that legal rules barred them from charging Mr. Ray with a crime because he did nothing active to foster the plan. They did prosecute the teenager who drove Mr. Rouse to school that morning.

Failing to act in the face of warning signs, the prosecutors said, was not a crime. In retrospect, there were many people guilty of that.

In ninth grade, Jamie had scratched an inverted cross on his forehead, a symbol other students had told him was a sign of Satan worship. Many people, including teachers, had noticed the mark, which lasted a few weeks, and talked about it among themselves.

At home during his junior year, Jamie held his brother Jeremy at gunpoint and threatened to kill him. As punishment, Jamie's parents took away his gun.

As his senior year began, he submitted his entry for the yearbook: ''I, Satan, James Rouse, leave my bad memories here to my two brothers.'' By that time, according to testimony at his trial, Jamie Rouse was working nights, taking Max Alert to stay awake and Sominex to get to sleep, and listening to heavy metal music cranked very loud because it drowned out the voices in his head that he later told psychiatrists he had been hearing at the time.

The spring before the shootings Mr. Rouse got into a violent fight with two other boys at school. But when teachers broke it up, ''Jamie just would not calm down,'' recalled Ronald W. Shirey Jr., the football coach that Jamie had missed shooting, in an interview in his living room a few miles from the school. ''He was just totally out of control, and saying, 'I will kill you,' '' Mr. Shirey said.

The school called the police after that fight. Mr. Rouse faced juvenile charges and was suspended for three days.

But time passed. His mother later said it had not occurred to her to get counseling for him. And when hunting season started, Jamie's parents gave him his rifle back.

Long after the crime, Mr. Shirey said, when government investigators sought to study ways to prevent school shootings, they asked him to circulate a survey among the teachers at Richland School, which has students from kindergarten through 12th grade, to gather information about Jamie Rouse. No survey came back with more than a paragraph, he said.

''You can't find a teacher up there that was close to Jamie Rouse since elementary school,'' Mr. Shirey said. ''Nobody knew enough about him to say anything.''

The adults noticed Jamie Rouse but did not know him, and the teenagers who knew him did not tell.

''I genuinely thought the public would be pleased because I thought all the public could see this and know and understand my good-intentions.''

Sylvia Seegrist, in a letter to a reporter from prison, Jan. 4, 2000

SHE was dressed in the green Army fatigues and knit cap she wore all four seasons of the year as she drove into the parking lot of the Springfield Mall in suburban Philadelphia. She leaped out of her car firing a Ruger semiautomatic rifle, and continued spraying bullets as she ran through the mall, killing three people and injuring seven, all strangers. Among the dead was a 2-year-old boy whose family had been shopping for a church charity fashion show.

Sylvia Seegrist was 25 the day of her murder spree in 1985. Her crime was the culmination of 10 years of mounting psychosis, crippling delusions and violent assaults on people who tried to help her.

Her mother, in a recent interview in her apartment a few miles from the site of Ms. Seegrist's rampage, remembered the ''feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, despair, of incredible sadness'' as she and her husband watched their only daughter overtaken by schizophrenia.

They also feared her. ''I'll take you out,'' Mrs. Seegrist recalls her daughter threatening.

The Times' study found that many of the rampage killers, including Sylvia Seegrist, suffered from severe psychosis, were known by people in their circles as being noticeably ill and needing help, and received insufficient or inconsistent treatment from a mental health system that seemed incapable of helping these especially intractable patients.

Only a small percentage of mentally ill people are violent, and many advocates bristle at any link between mental illness and violence out of concern that it will further stigmatize an already mistreated population.

However, the Times investigation of this particular style of violence -- public rampage killings -- turned up an extremely high association between violence and mental illness. Forty-seven of the killers had a history of mental health problems before they killed; 20 had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems; 42 had been seen by mental health professionals.

Psychiatric drugs had been prescribed at some point before the rampages to 24 of the killers, and 14 of those people were not taking their prescribed drugs when they killed. Diagnoses of mental illness are often difficult to pin down, so The Times tabulated behavior: 23 killers showed signs of serious depression before the killings, and 49 expressed paranoid ideas.

Some of the killers who survived their rampages have made it clear they preferred to be thought of as criminal rather than mentally ill. Back in 1966, Robert Benjamin Smith, an 18-year-old high school senior in Mesa, Ariz., said he believed he was God when he herded five women and two children into the back room of a beauty school, forced them to lie down in a circle and methodically shot each person in the head, killing five of them.

In a letter Mr. Smith sent to a Times reporter from prison in January, he brushed off questions about illness and wrote, ''Lessons? The sole thing I have learned worth the telling is the ironclad necessity of retaining control over one's essential bodily fluids.'' He blamed ''sexual self-stimulation'' for his crime and noted that he had tried to amputate his penis while in prison using the pull-tab from a can of diet soda.

''The more ill they are, the less sensibility there is'' in the violent attack itself, said Anthony G. Hempel, chief forensic psychiatrist at the Vernon campus of North Texas State Hospital. Dr. Hempel, who has studied mass murderers, said that in contrast to the killers who ''go postal,'' gunning for their bosses, ''when someone goes and kills strangers or they kill children, the odds of them being mentally ill are higher.''

Sylvia Seegrist was first hospitalized at 16, and schizophrenia was diagnosed. Each of the dozen times she was discharged, psychiatrists deemed that she no longer posed a threat to herself or others.

No one said she was getting better, though. At the local health club Ms. Seegrist was seen taking steam baths in her camouflage clothing. At the library, she spouted a tangle of theories about nuclear weapons, energy shortages and famine. Between her daughter's hospitalizations, Mrs. Seegrist found a gun in Sylvia's apartment, she said. Ms. Seegrist told her mother she planned to use it to kill her parents and then herself.

Mrs. Seegrist said the family could not afford private rehabilitation programs, and their insurance covered only short-term hospitalization.

Sylvia Seegrist, now 39, is serving a life sentence at a prison in Pennsylvania. She declined an interview, instead writing two letters to The Times, a weave of lucid fragments and unintelligible passages about benzene and Styrofoam. On the back of an envelope, she writes that her killings were a form of public service.

She also seems to assert that she had to kill to ensure she would be imprisoned instead of being sent yet again to a state mental hospital.

''Sure had all kinds of theories in my head,'' she wrote, ''expressed them at political meetings, just doll, understand, please 10 yrs. of beat-up, orphan in state hospitals that are 300 % worse than even Sing-Sing prison. All the throwaways retarded smearing feces on themselves, when I read research materials at Ivy league colleges, and watched nothing but CNN and C-Span at home.''

She said she had no choice. ''It had to be 'a serious crime' or I'd get the state hospital i.e. Nazi camp.''

'' I was trying to save myself and my family.''

Jeffrey Wade Wallace in a prison interview, Feb. 1, 2000

ROXIE M. WALLACE knew something was wrong when her grown son Jeffrey visited her, and padlocked his room. He sometimes slept with a knife by his bed. He was growing increasingly paranoid, she realized. He would talk incessantly about evil forces. Most disturbing, she said in interviews and letters, her son sometimes growled ''like a small dog or a wolf.''

Mr. Wallace offers a glimpse into how difficult it can be to shake someone out of a delusional universe, even when friends and relatives notice and want to do something about it. Mr. Wallace, like other rampage killers, was convinced he was defending himself against an intricate conspiracy. Of the 100 cases in the study, 49 involved killers who had shown extreme, irrational suspicion and mistrust. In their paranoia, they think they must defend themselves against threats that other people do not see.

Even now, incarcerated in an isolated Florida prison, Mr. Wallace, 38, insists that he had no choice but to open fire in 1997 at a Key West bar where he once worked, killing one person and injuring three others.

In a long prison interview, Mr. Wallace was unable to deviate from his convoluted theory that the bar was the center of an organized-crime drug and prostitution ring with ties -- he was sure -- to Satanism, President Clinton and Garrison Keillor, host of the public radio program ''Prairie Home Companion.''

Mr. Wallace's lawyers argued unsuccessfully that he was insane, but Mr. Wallace insists his actions were perfectly rational.

''The best example I can give,'' Mr. Wallace said, ''is you're in your house and somebody breaks in and you have to defend yourself and you end up killing somebody. It's terrible but what else can you do?''

From her home in Tennessee, Mrs. Wallace said she had tried for years to maneuver her son toward help when he did not want it. ''I was afraid he was either going to kill himself or he was going to 'fight back' to save himself like a caged animal,'' she said.

Many rampage killers are extremely difficult to treat, say psychiatrists who have interviewed them. They may deny their illness and resist medication and treatment, and are often shrewd about masking symptoms to avoid being hospitalized involuntarily.

Even those who do receive psychiatric treatment do not always get the help they need.

Joseph Brooks Jr. was a policeman's son from Detroit and one of the few black students to win entrance to both a prestigious local preparatory school and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Friends in the fraternity house where Mr. Brooks lived recall no hint of anger or illness, only that Mr. Brooks was absurdly meticulous about his chores, and studied so compulsively that they nicknamed him Books. But in his third year at M.I.T., he tried to commit suicide, was hospitalized for obsessive-compulsive disorder, and later received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Back in Detroit, living alone, Mr. Brooks, 28, sought treatment with Dr. Reuven Bar-Levav, a well-known local psychiatrist who ran group therapy sessions in Southfield attended by a close-knit clientele of upper-middle-class patients coping with depression or anxiety disorders -- nothing as severe as paranoid schizophrenia. Mr. Brooks joined the group sessions, but refused to take the medication he had been prescribed, telling friends that the drugs made him tremble, gain weight and lose concentration.

Ronald Rissman, a fellow patient in the therapy group Mr. Brooks joined, said in an interview, ''It was obvious he was not in touch with reality. He would laugh inappropriately. Within a matter of two or three group sessions, it became apparent to most of the senior patients that he did not belong there, that he should have been institutionalized.''

Mr. Rissman said he and several other patients and therapists in the group practice repeatedly went to Dr. Bar-Levav with their concerns about Mr. Brooks. And in one group session -- with Mr. Brooks in the room -- a patient named Mary Gregg told the group she was afraid of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Rissman recalled.

After about eight group sessions, Dr. Bar-Levav finally terminated Mr. Brooks's treatment and referred him to other therapists.

Eight months later, on June 11 last year, Mr. Brooks returned to the psychiatrist's office and killed Dr. Bar-Levav. Mr. Brooks then pivoted and fired into the therapy group he had once attended, killing Mrs. Gregg and wounding four others, including Mr. Rissman, who leapt up to close the door. Mr. Brooks then turned the gun on himself.

Dr. Bar-Levav had been given some warning: while in treatment, Mr. Brooks had handed a gun over to another therapist in the practice and confessed he had come close to killing his girlfriend's mother and committing suicide. And just before the killings, Mr. Brooks sent Dr. Bar-Levav a 52-page manuscript critiquing the therapy he had received from him. The critique contained obsessive, paranoid passages about a ''German American woman'' humiliating him in his therapy group, and hints of menace. The local police emphasized in interviews with The Times that Dr. Bar-Levav should have alerted them.

''We would have taken that weapon away from him,'' said Joseph Thomas, the chief of police in Southfield, Mich. But even had the police confiscated the gun, the killing would not have been prevented. Mr. Brooks easily obtained a second permit and a second gun -- an expensive limited-edition combat-style handgun, which he used to kill Dr. Bar-Levav.

The psychiatrist's daughter, Dr. Leora Bar-Levav, a therapist herself who worked with her father and is now carrying on his practice, rejected with a pained wince the suggestion of negligence. In a conversation in the practice's new offices in Southfield, she said the problem was instead a permissive society and a narcissistic patient who had rejected treatment.

''You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it,'' she said. ''Denial is very potent.''

''You can have it because I probably wouldn't need it much longer.''

James Floyd Davis on giving his niece a video game a few days before his workplace rampage

A MAN storms a warehouse where he was recently fired, leaving a trail of shell casings, three dead workers and four more wounded. The news story the next day begins, ''A disgruntled former employee went on a shooting rampage.''

In the turmoil that follows a rampage shooting by a killer like James Davis in Asheville, N.C., there is usually a scramble to pinpoint the cause. And in a world of rapid news cycles, the answers come quickly.

Mr. Davis was the ''disgruntled employee.'' In news coverage last year, Dung Trinh was described as so bereaved at the death of his mother that in September he shot at nurses in a hospital in Anaheim, Calif., where she had once been treated. Sometimes the reason is reported to be a broken marriage, a spurned romance or financial misfortune. Mark O. Barton, a rampage killer in Atlanta, was reported to have singled out day traders because he had suffered huge losses in the market.

These are the kinds of events that often result in the observation, ''He just snapped.''

But the incident that is often simplistically cited as the cause -- a firing, a divorce, an eviction -- is on closer examination just the final provocation to a troubled, angry person who has already left numerous warning markers, often available for many to see.

When he opened fire in the day-trading office, Mr. Barton already had problems deeper than his recent stock losses. Eight hours earlier, he had killed his second wife and his children, and he was still the prime suspect in the deaths six years earlier of his first wife and her mother.

Colin Ferguson, who opened fire on rush-hour commuters on the Long Island Rail Road, had displayed such menacing behavior that he received an eviction notice, which further fueled his fury.

Most of the workplace shooters had been fired or disciplined precisely because they were already threatening violence, behaving bizarrely or getting in fights. Of the 81 adult murderers The Times looked at, 49 were unemployed.

Mr. Davis was no mild-mannered worker who just mysteriously snapped, according to court records and interviews.

He repeatedly picked fights at the tool warehouse where he worked in Asheville, and had often told colleagues that if he were ever fired, he would return to kill his bosses. He had seen combat in Vietnam and been hospitalized with schizophrenia after the war. He lived alone, and co-workers knew he owned a .44 Magnum with a scope and had practiced firing it in his basement.

One Wednesday in May 1995, he got into another fight at work, his last.

That weekend, his family noticed him acting strangely. For example, Mr. Davis, an unemotional recluse, told his sister he loved her. And though James had never given anything to anybody, his brother, William, later said, James had wanted to give his niece a chess set and video game the weekend before. His siblings tried to persuade him to go to a hospital for psychiatric help, but he refused.

That Monday, James Davis was fired. His bosses were so anxious about his reaction that they agreed to break the news in a room where they could use a table to deflect an attack. Some employees planned escape routes when they heard of Mr. Davis's firing.

Just after midnight on Wednesday, William Davis called the police from his house 100 miles away to tell them that James had left home in a nervous frenzy and left all his personal belongings with their mother.

''I don't see why you got to wait till he kills himself or somebody,'' William Davis told the police, according to a transcript of his telephone call. ''If you send a patrol car out to that plant, he's probably sitting there. Or notify them.'' William Davis told the police, ''I don't know for sure, but I know and believe by the warning signs he gave me he's going to die.'' The Asheville police did drive by James Davis's house, but said that when they saw there was no vehicle in the driveway, there was nothing else they could do.

William Davis testified that he got in his car around 2 a.m. and drove to what he thought was his brother's workplace. But because he had not lived in Asheville for many years, he went to the wrong plant. The gate was shut, so he drove back to his mother's house to sleep.

James Davis never came home. That morning, on Wednesday, May 17, he stormed the Union Butterfield plant. Two of the victims were the bosses who fired him.

''I live for the rest of my life knowing that if someone had listened to me, no one would have died,'' William Davis said in an interview. ''I could have stopped it if someone would have listened.''

Last spring, with Mr. Davis already on death row, a jury considered a civil suit claiming that his employers had failed to protect the other employees from a man they knew to be violent. A lawyer for the company argued there was no way anyone could foresee such an attack.

A lawyer for the victims said, ''This case is a human tragedy because this could have been prevented.''

The jury agreed, awarding the families of two of the victims $7.9 million. An appeal has been filed.

''I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted. I destroy everything I touch. I can't eat. I can't sleep. I didn't deserve them. They were wonderful people. It's not their fault or the fault of any person, organization, or television show. My head just doesn't work right. God damn these VOICES inside my head.''

From the note Kip Kinkel left on the coffee table in his house after killing his parents

EVEN the cases that drew wide attention offer fresh insights when re-examined in the context of the Times review.

One spring day, Kipland P. Kinkel, a freckle-faced boy with a history of behavior problems in school, disrupted his ninth-grade literature class by abruptly yelling out loud, ''God damn this voice inside my head!''

His teacher took immediate action. He wrote up a disciplinary note. ''In the future,'' it asked, ''what could you do differently to prevent this problem?''

Kip dutifully filled out the answer: ''Not to say 'Damn.' ''

The note was signed by the teacher. Kip took it home to his mother, and she signed it too.

Nobody paid attention to the part about the voice inside Kip's head.

One month later, on May 20, 1998, Kip was suspended from school for buying a stolen gun and stashing it in his locker. That afternoon, back at home in a wooded neighborhood called Shangri La, Kip Kinkel, 15, shot his father and then his mother.

The next morning he drove to his school in Springfield, Ore., and shot 24 people in the cafeteria, killing two students.

Sometimes even concerned parents, like the Kinkels, or other caring adults, find the specter of serious mental or emotional problems in a child so disturbing that they lapse into denial, the study found over and over.

The youngsters themselves often unwittingly assist in the denial by being reluctant to tell someone about hearing voices or having bizarre thoughts, in fear of being labeled mentally ill. Complicating the picture is the fact that in adolescents like Kip, the symptoms are most likely just emerging, psychiatric experts say.

Kip Kinkel's parents, while perhaps unwilling to face the serious implications of his outburst in class, had not been blind to his problems, according to interviews and court records. They were both schoolteachers, and such behavior would have been hard to ignore. Starting at age 6, when Kip hit a boy twice his age with a piece of metal bar, he was susceptible to uncontrollable rages.

As a teenager, like many of the killers in the study, he showed an inordinate fascination with weapons. He collected knives, secretly built explosives and boasted to friends that he wanted to be the next Unabomber. He detonated explosives at a local quarry and was caught by the police throwing rocks at cars off a highway overpass, a prank that some psychologists say is an early indication of a potential for violent tendencies.

His mother took him to a therapist. Kip showed symptoms, the therapist noted, of ''major depressive disorder,'' and was prescribed Prozac.

But William Kinkel, Kip's father, did not approve of therapy, and never attended the sessions, Mark Sabitt, Kip's defense lawyer, said in an interview. Mr. Sabitt said that Mr. Kinkel was ''a very proud individual and aware of his image in the community. He was very skeptical of counseling in general and closed to the notion of someone in his family needing treatment, or even worse, being mentally ill. It just didn't fit with the image he had of his kids and what he hoped they would be.''

After nine therapy sessions and three months of summer vacation on Prozac, Kip's behavior improved, so his parents discontinued the therapy and the medication. Kip's father bought him the Glock semiautomatic pistol his son had been pestering him for.

At Kip's sentencing hearing, the defense presented a family tree showing severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, affecting three generations on both maternal and paternal sides.

When Kip's victims addressed the judge, some said he was faking insanity. Others said that even if insane, he should be held responsible for ripping apart their lives.

''I don't care if you're sick, if you're insane, if you're crazy,'' said Jacob Ryker, one of the students who finally tackled Kip, despite gunshot wounds in his own chest and arm. ''I don't care. I think prison, a lifetime in prison is too good for you. If a dog was to go insane and if a dog got rabid and it bit someone, you destroy it. So I stand here and I ask, why haven't you been destroyed? I question myself for not pulling the trigger.''

''I got to go. I'm loading magazines.''

Sgt. William Kreutzer Jr. in his last telephone call to a squadmate

AN agitated Sgt. William Kreutzer Jr. telephoned a friend in his squad at Fort Bragg, N.C. He said the shooting would begin the next morning at daybreak, just when 1,300 soldiers were on a field stretching before their morning run.

''He said he was going to 'mow them down,' '' said his friend, Specialist Burl F. Mays.

True, Sergeant Kreutzer was an odd loner who talked about killing so often that the men in his company had nicknamed him Crazy Kreutzer and Silence of the Lambs. But when Specialist Mays arrived early the next morning and saw Sergent Kreutzer was not in, he feared that this time it was no idle threat. He told his superiors just before 5 a.m. and was asked to check Sergeant Kreutzer's room.

He found that the bed had not been slept in. On the desk he found a draft of Sergeant Kreutzer's will.

Specialist Mays later testified that when he then tried to alarm superiors, the first sergeant dismissed his concerns, saying something like, ''Kreutzer is a pussy, he wouldn't do anything like this.''

The case of Sergeant Kreutzer, told in court records and interviews, illustrates an altogether different common case: the depressed and angry misfit provoked by the people around him.

Park Elliott Dietz, a psychiatrist and expert on mass killers, said people who become mass murderers are often ''handled in a provocative, ineffective way.'' Their outrageous fantasies of violence draw public condemnation or ridicule. Humiliation, Dr. Dietz said, often precedes rampage killing.

Sergeant Kreutzer, a gawky perfectionist, had long been the object of ridicule in his squad at Fort Bragg. When his unit was sent to the Sinai, other soldiers tied his shoelaces together while he slept. They filled his boots with sand. Sergeant Kreutzer, 26, had always wanted to be a soldier, but he lagged behind on company runs and sometimes misplaced equipment. He cried when criticized. When he repeatedly threatened to kill other soldiers, they took it as a joke.

Fifteen months before his final ambush, when Sergeant Kreutzer had an outburst in which he threatened to kill soldiers, and it became common knowledge, his superiors sent him to a military social worker.

''He told me that he had specific plans to kill the people in his squad,'' the counselor, Darren Fong, told military investigators, the court-martial documents show. But when he was returned to full duty, Sergeant Kreutzer was not referred to Army psychiatrists. He was barred from access to weapons for two weeks.

The morning of Oct. 27, 1995, Sergeant Kreutzer hid in the woods and fired onto a field of American soldiers who thought they were at peace. He wounded 18 of them, and killed Maj. Stephen Mark Badger, an intelligence officer and a father and stepfather of eight children.

Sergeant Kreutzer kept firing until he was tackled from behind by two comrades.

Minutes later, he spoke to a military police officer, Bruce W. Hamrick.

''He said he kept warning people that he was going to kill somebody,'' Mr. Hamrick testified, ''but that nobody would listen.''

TUESDAY -- The difficulty of keeping guns out of the hands of the seriously mentally ill.

WEDNESDAY -- One father's efforts to understand his son's murder by a rampage killer.

Related articles, an interactive map and a discussion forum are available at The New York Times on the Web: http://www.nytimes.com

Reporting for this series was by Fox Butterfield, Ford Fessenden, William Glaberson and Laurie Goodstein, with research assistance from Anthony Zirilli and other members of the news research staff of The New York Times.